Hamilton: the Broadway phenomenon that made US history hip

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End of year reports coming from America are talking about 2015 as a golden year on Broadway, with two British-grown transfers in particular being singled out for praise – the Young Vic’s A View from the Bridge and the Almeida’s King Charles III. But the production sweeping everything before it is Hamilton, an unlikely sounding hip-hop musical, by 35-year-old Lin-Manuel Miranda, about one of the lesser-known founding fathers of America.

The musical, which after a successful Off-Broadway run took over $60 million before it opened on Broadway in August, tells the tale of Alexander Hamilton (played by Miranda), a Scottish/French, Caribbean-born immigrant who travelled from the island of St Croix to New York in the late 18th-century, and became the right-hand man to George Washington. A prodigiously talented orator, he was a hero of the American War for Independence and a fierce advocate for the new Constitution. He was also an abrasive character who was involved in a notorious sex scandal and died before he reached 50 in a duel with the former Vice-President of America Aaron Burr.

Daveed Diggs as Thomas Jefferson in HamiltonCredit:
Joan Marcus

It’s being billed as a game-changer in Broadway history, the first musical since Rent to bring the kind of popular music people are actually listening to in clubs, on the radio, at home, to the Broadway stage. It’s already sold out until September 2016; the album, which reached number three in the rap charts, is the highest selling cast recording for 50 years; and tickets are reportedly changing hands on the black market for over $4,000. Andrew Lloyd Webber, whose musical School of has just opened on Broadway, told Stephen Colbert on The Late Show, with unashamed envy, “I wish I’d written Hamilton.” Ben Brantley, the New York Times critic who can sprinkle gold-dust on a show or close it overnight, wrote, “I am loath to tell people to mortgage their houses and lease their children to acquire tickets to a hit musical. But Hamilton… might just be about worth it.” Cameron Mackintosh is already in discussions about finding a West End theatre for it in 2017.

On Broadway, Hollywood stars, hip-hop royalty and politicians of every persuasion have turned out in droves to see it. President Obama took his daughters, Bill Clinton has seen it, as has Julia Roberts, Susan Sarandon and Madonna (though she, according to cast members, spent most of her time glued to her mobile). Jay-Z and Beyoncé posed with the cast after the show. One night JJ Abrams, the director of Star Wars: The Force Awakens, came and asked Manuel to write music for a scene in the film. Even Dick Cheney and his wife have been in the audience; Dick liked it very much, according to his wife.

Put simply, Hamilton does for American history what Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet did for Shakespeare. Yet it shouldn’t work at all. Late 18th-century American history and hip-hop are hardly the most obvious bedfellows and it’s not even very well-known late 18th-century American history. Thomas Kail, the director, with whom I caught up just before Christmas, describes Alexander Hamilton to me as “like the B-side of the Founding Fathers, the deep cut on the album that the really hard-core fan knows about.”

But from the moment the opening rap, sharp and assured, kicks in, it all begins to make curious sense: “How does a bastard, orphan, son of a whore/ And a Scotsman, dropped in the middle of a forgotten spot/ In the Caribbean by Providence, impoverished, in squalor/ Grow up to be a hero and a scholar?” Later on there are rap battles over fiscal policy stirring, instant classic anthems (Wait For It) and duels introduced, with a loving nod to Notorious B.I.G.’s track Ten Crack Commandments, by a song called Ten Duel Commandments. Miranda’s references range from Tupac, Eminem and the other grandmasters of hip-hop to Rogers and Hammerstein, Sondheim, West Side Story and Gilbert and Sullivan.

Hamilton’s staging is reminiscent of Les Misérables, the actors dressed in lush period costume against the backdrop of a bare stage. The cast is almost entirely non-Caucasian. “Our cast looks like America looks now,” Miranda- the New York-born son of Puerto Rican immigrants - has said. “It’s a way of pulling you into the story and allowing you to leave whatever cultural baggage you have about the founding fathers at the door.”

Think of it as Les Misérables meets 8 Mile, and you’re somewhere in the ballpark. It could be awful - Broadway fashionably slumming it with a sprinkling of ghetto grime - but it’s not.

Miranda, as Kail points out to me, is the real deal when it comes to hip-hop; he’s been rapping since he was a child: “This isn’t his attempt at it; it’s a language which Lin is fluent in.” The musical is no overnight success. Miranda’s been working on it for seven years, and in musicals since his late teens.

He grew up in the Washington Heights area in uptown New York, the son of first generation Puerto Rican immigrants. His father was political adviser to the New York mayor Ed Koch, his mother a clinical psychologist and Miranda attended a high-school for gifted children on the upper east side.

A photo posted by Hamilton (@hamiltonmusical) on Nov 20, 2015 at 7:25pm PST

He went on to study at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, where his love for music and drama flourished. While there he wrote and produced the first draft of a musical In the Heights – a love story set in his home neighbourhood. Kail, who left Wesleyan two years before Miranda, first heard the demo of In the Heights when a friend sent it to him. He was immediately struck by the freshness of its sound, infused as it was with Latin and hip-hop rhythms: “What I was most struck by was that it sounded like the kind of music I would have on my stereo. It just felt like my music.” Miranda went on to write and star in a Broadway production of In the Heights, directed by Kail. It walked away with four Tony awards.

The idea for Hamilton came when Miranda took a holiday from performing In the Heights. On a whim, he bought the biography of Hamilton by the Pulitzer prize winning author Ron Chernow. “I didn’t know Hamilton was an immigrant and I didn’t know half the traumas of his early life,” he said in a recent interview. “And when he gets to New York, I was like, ‘I know this guy.’ I’ve met so many versions of this guy, and it’s the guy who comes to this country and is like. ‘I am going to work six jobs if you are only working one. I’m gonna make a life for myself here.’ That’s a familiar storyline to me, beginning with my father and so many people I grew up with in my neighbourhood.”

Taking the idea that all Americans – even the founding fathers – have at some point in their family history been immigrants and have had to scrabble their way to the top, he ran with it, and found in hip-hop the perfect voice to express the anger and desire, hope and longing of the immigrant experience.

He began to write a rap titled ‘The Hamilton Mixtape’ (which turned into the opening narrative of the musical), and in 2009 seized his chance to premier it when he was invited to an evening of live performances at the White House, centred on “the American experience”. The President was, to say the least, impressed. Seven years on Broadway audiences can see just why.

Kail says that the response he’s had from the rap community has been “overwhelmingly positive. Busta Rhymes was one of the first artists who came to see the show, and he had a very big influence not only on the show, but also in every song that Lin and I listened to between 1988 and, well, yesterday.” Rhymes told reporters: “I think it’s the first time that we’ve had an opportunity to see a real Broadway play being given to the people, historically accurate from a hip-hop perspective… This is actually a kind of defining moment.”

It’s one thing to have the rap firmament and le tout Hollywood turn up, but whether the musical is bringing a different audience to Broadway is another matter. It’s hard with a show where tickets are being exchanged on the black market for eye-watering sums to change the demographic, but Miranda and Kail have insisted that there should be a daily lottery for tickets priced at $10. So many people turn up – 1,000 plus throng the street outside the theatre every day – that Miranda has instigated impromptu performances by members of the cast on the steps of the theatre.

These performances then go viral online, such is the buzz. Next year the plan is to bring 20,000 16-year-olds to see the show, again at $10, “to encourage the next generation of theatregoers and theatremakers,” says Kail, “to come and feel that theatre is also for them.” But they’re still trying to “figure out” quite how to achieve this. It would set another great precedent if they can.

Hamilton director, Thomas Kail, from left, and cast members Daveed Diggs, Lin-Manuel Miranda and Anthony Ramos during Broadway rehearsals at the New 42nd Street Studios in New YorkCredit:
Charles Sykes/Invision

What Miranda couldn’t have foreseen when he started work on Hamilton was that immigration would be so high on the news agenda in 2015, and he couldn’t have foreseen Donald Trump. Miranda has said about Trump, “I think of him the way I think of, like, pigeons. It’s just a New York annoyance that’s gone national, like, ‘Oh, f---, a pigeon s--- on me.”

I ask Kail if Trump has made the message of Hamilton even more important, but he won’t be drawn into a fight: “Our job was to try to do what we could do to tell the story and our show is our acknowledgement of the struggle of so many people who came from other places to make something new. And that’s the best way we can address that because the political quagmire that can exist is a very slippery slope.”

What British audience will make of it when it comes to London remains to be seen, but be prepared for the kind of mania that greeted Benedict Cumberbatch’s Hamlet this summer.

“Like most good ideas,” Kail says, dryly, “it doesn’t make sense until somebody puts in front of you and you say, ‘Oh, of course.’”